Monday, September 15, 2008

Weak Dollar

Here is a quick look at what the weak dollar is doing for America and why. I will try to keep it simple.

We live beyond our means, but due to a excellent credit history in the past, and the greed of the credit industry, we get a lot of Visa cards.

When we get close the maxing out a card, we get a new one. The credit industry (China, Dubai, etc) need a safe place to keep their money -- it's a win win.

We roll over the old debt into new debt.

We need to keep the money coming, because our system (Capitalism) only works with growth -- living within our means is death to our way of life.

We finance everyone -- we allow companies to leverage with a dollar for every $30 of risk. When the loans go bad -- only one out of thirty has to go bad to break us to even.

Big boys don't care -- they already got the money in commissions, but feeding the machine with the promise of the future allows us to maintain a collective illusion that we are dealing with hard money earned with productivity.

We are selling air inflated in the shell of our reputation and marketed by a fog machine of respectability. Ill wind or Trade breeze, at some point the skys will always clear.

We are left with our possession in the pawn shop with our future earnings to secure them. We are paralysed -- there is no money to give out, we spent it and the horse it rode in on.

Now to the weak dollar.

We are reduced to taking our possession's out on the lawn on a stormy weekend to sell to passer-buyers for pennies on the dollar.

And, god help us, now the dollar is rising. We may end up selling our children like the Philippinos do.

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About Me

"Supreme egotism and utter seriousness are necessary for the greatest accomplishment,
and these the Irish find hard to sustain; at some point, the instinct to see life in a
comic light becomes irrestible, and ambition falls before it."
William Shannon